Replacements, "Rock 'n' Roll Ghost" (1989)

(listen)

I had the great good fortune of being in the right place at the right time for the humble scruffy rise to legend on which the Replacements embarked in Minneapolis in the early '80s—the original Replacements, with Bob Stinson. But the album by them that I have listened to most over the years is Don't Tell a Soul, the oft derided and frequently overlooked first, in 1989, of two all-but-swan-song late entrants. My reasons may not be good but they are honest. Yes, there's a sound of resignation and defeat. That's part of what I like, it virtually shipping itself into my life at a moment of particular crisis, a separation begun that would lead to divorce and all that. In a way the album was exactly what I needed (with its companion Spike by Elvis Costello), manifesting as a kind of self-healing template cycle where I could feel like I could travel daily, where redemption, as in this song, posed in affectation, for example here the cobwebby haunted manse, shuffling about sleepless at night in robe and nightcap, tempting the fates of self-pity. Rheumy old Edgar Allen Poe and the bottle or opium dens in the small hours. Vaporous dark time passing and lost. It's not pretty, and it's a little bit of a joke, but it fits a certain mood to a tee. There's a few songs on Don't Tell a Soul operating at such levels for me—"Achin' to Be" and "They're Blind" fit that bill nicely. But this one goes ahead and dares the obvious gesture of making of itself an eternal legend, the naked love for the image of one's own fame in the reflection written into the grains of it. It haunts many of the compeers but it is also what makes it a joke. It's the "ghost" that gives that away. No, it's the "rock 'n' roll" that gives that away. No, it's the mirror that gives that away.